Serpent's Reach (21 page)

No more than the hives
, she thought, and went downstairs.

Ab Tallen brought a different pair with him…an older woman named Mara Chung and a middle-aged man named Ben Orrin. Warrior was nervous with their presence: what Warrior could not touch made it entirely nervous, and the police had liked Warrior no better, having the duty of escorting the Outsiders to the safety of the house.

Max served drinks: Jim was still upstairs, and Raen was content with that, for Max managed well enough, playing house-azi. She sipped at hers and watched the Outsiders’ eyes, what things drew them, what things seemed of interest.

Max himself was, it seemed. Ser Orrin was injudicious enough to stare at him directly, glanced abruptly at some point on the glass he held when he realised it.

Raen smiled, caught Max’s eyes and with a flick of hers, dismissed him to neutrality somewhere behind her. She looked at her guests. “Seri,” she murmured, with a gesture of the glass. “Your welcome. Your profound welcome. Be at ease. I plan no traps. I know what you’ve been doing on Istra. It’s of no moment to me. Probably others of the Family find it temporarily convenient. A measure which has prevented difficulties here. How could the Reach complain of that?”

“If you would be clear, Kont’ Raen—what interests you do serve, forgive me—we might be on firmer footing.”

“Ser Tallen, I am not being subtle at the moment. I am here. I don’t choose to see anything of the transactions you’ve made with Istra. Pursuing that would be of no profit to me, and a great deal of inconvenience. Some interests in the Family would be pleased with what you’re doing; others would be outraged; Council would debate it and the outcome would be uncertain, but perhaps unfavourable. Myself, I don’t care. The hives are fed. That’s a great benefit. Azi aren’t starved. That’s another. It makes Istra liveable, and I’m living on Istra. Plain?”

There was long silence. Tallen took a drink and stared at her, long and directly. “Do you represent someone?”

“I’m Meth-maren. Some used to call us hive-masters; it’s a term we’ve always disliked, but it’s descriptive. That’s what I represent, though some dispute it.”

“You control the majat?”

She shook her head. “No one—
controls
the majat. Anyone who tells you he does…lies. I’m an intermediary. An interpreter.”

“‘Though some dispute it,’ you said.”

“There are factions in the Family, seri, as aforesaid. You might hear others disputing everything I say. You’ll have to make up your own mind, weighing your own risks. I’ve called you here, for one thing, simply to lay all things out in open question, so that you don’t have to ask ITAK questions that are much easier to ask of me directly. You had to wonder how much secrecy you needed use with certain items of trade; you could have wasted a great deal of energy attempting to conceal a fact which is of no importance to me. I consider it courtesy to tell you.”

“Your manners are very direct, Kont’ Raen. And yet you don’t say a word of why you’ve come.”

“No, ser. I don’t intend to.” She lowered her eyes and took a drink, diminishing the harshness of that refusal, glanced up again. “I confess to a lively curiosity about you—about the Outside. How many worlds are there?”

“Above fifty around the human stars.”

“Fifty…and non-human? Have you found other such?”

Tallen’s eyes broke contact, and disappointed her, even, it seemed, with regret to do so. “A restricted matter, Kont’ Raen.”

She inclined her head, turned the glass in her hand, let the melting ice continue spinning, frowned—thinking on Outside, and on the ship at station, Outbound.

“We are concerned,” Tallen said, “that the Reach remain stable.”

“I do not doubt” She regarded him and his companions, male and female. “I doubt that I can answer your questions either.”

“Do you invite them?” And when she shrugged: “Who governs? Who decides policies? Do majat or humans dominate here?”

“Moth governs; the Council decides; majat and humans are separate by nature.”

“Yet you interpret.”

“I interpret.”

“And remain separate?”

“That, ser,” she answered, having lost her self-possession for the second time, “remains a question.” She frowned. “But there remains one more matter, seri, for which I asked you here. And I shall ask it and hope for the plain truth: among the bargains that you have made with concerns inside the Reach—is there any breach of quarantine? You’re not—providing exit for any citizens of the Reach? You’ve not agreed to do so in future?”

They were disturbed by this, as they might be.

“No,” Tallen said.

“Again, my personal position is one of complete disregard. No. Not complete. I would,” she said with a shrug and a smile, “be personally interested. I would be very interested to see what’s over the Edge. But this is not the case. There is no exit.”

“None. It would not be tolerated, Kont’ Raen, much as it is regrettable.”

“I am satisfied, then. That was the one item which troubled me. You’ve answered me. I think that I believe you. All our business for my part is done. Perhaps a social meeting when there’s leisure for it.”

“It would be a pleasure, Kont’ Raen.”

She inclined her head, set her glass aside, giving them the excuse to do the same.

There were formalities, shaking of hands, parting courtesies: she went personally to the door and made sure that Warrior did not approach them as they entered their car and closed the doors.

“Max,” she said, “see to the gate out there. Make sure our security is intact.”

He was over-zealous; he went without more than his sunvisor, and she frowned over it, for Istra’s sun was no kinder than Cerdin’s. New azi. Anxious and over-anxious to please. It was worse in its way than dealing with housecomp.

The car reached the gate and exited; Max saw to the closing and walked back, Warrior gliding along at a little distance, keeping a critical majat eye on all that passed.

Max entered, sought more instruction. “Just protect yourself when you go out, after this,” she said peevishly, and dismissed him. She was depressed by the encounter, had hoped otherwise, and logically could not say why.

She closed and sealed the door, blinking somewhat from the change of light, from the portico to the inner hall—looked up, for Jim was on the stairs, watching her.

He looked yet a little abstracted; deepstudy did that to one. And he had been upstairs longer than the tape had run…asleep, perhaps. It was a common reaction.

“You didn’t repeat it, did you?” she asked, thinking of Max’s excessive zeal, concerned for that.

“I listened aloud for several times.”

“You were supposed to enjoy it.”

“I thought I was supposed to learn it.” He shrugged from the stare she gave him for that, glanced down briefly, a flinching. “Is there something I can do now?”

She shook her head, and went back to her work.

The supplies arrived: Jim went out with Max and Merry to fend off Warrior while they were unloaded; it evidently was managed without incident, for she heard nothing of it. Six of the neighbours called, advising that they were indeed seeking shelter elsewhere; three were silent, and calls to them raised no human answer, only housecomp. There were several more calls from various sources, including ITAK and ISPAK.

For the most part there was no sound in the house at all, not a stirring from Jim, wherever he was and whatever he did to pass the time. He appeared at last, prepared supper, shared it with her in silence and vanished again. She would have spoken with him at dinner, but she was preoccupied with the recollection of her work with the comp net, and with the hazard of dipping as she did into intercomp; it was nothing to touch lightly, a taut-strung web which could radiate alarms if jostled too severely. She did not need abstract discussion with an azi to unhinge her thought.

He was there after midnight, when she came to bed, and even then she was not in a mood for conversation; he sensed this, evidently, and did not attempt it. But the work was almost done, and she could, for a time, let it go.

She did so; he obliged, cheerfully, and seemed content.

She went down alone in the morning, letting Jim sleep while he would; and the fear that some urgent message, some calamity, some profound change in circumstances might be waiting in the housecomp’s memory, sent her stumbling down to check on it before her eyes were fully open.

Only the same sort of message that had been coming in during the last day and night. She scanned the message-function a second time, refusing to believe in her continued safety, and finally accepted that this was so—pushed her hair out of her eyes and wandered off to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee: Outsider-luxuries, cheaper here than in innerworlds, for all the threat of famine. Istra was not backward where it regarded what was obtained from Outsider trade.

She drank her breakfast standing up, staring glaze-eyed at the en through the kitchen’s long slit window, thinking even then that the house had far too many windows, too many accesses, and that the walls were a good deal too low to serve even against human intruders: they masked what went on outside and close to them, and were no defense, only a delay.

The rising of beta Hydri gave a wan light at this hour—wan by reason of the shaded glass. The light rimmed the walls, the edge of the azi-quarters which showed a gleam of interior light, and over the wall, far distant, showed a vague impression of the domes of another arm of the City, with brush and grassland intervening: another hazard. Within the walls was deep shadow. The light frosted edges of rocks, of hastate-leaved plants, of the garden’s few trees, which were gnarled and twisted and looked dead until one realised that the limp strings which hung along the limbs were leaves. A vine which ran among the rocks like a brown snarl of old cable by day had miraculously spread leaves for the dawn. Other things likewise had leafed out or bloomed, for the one brief period of moderate light and coolness. By day the garden reverted to reality. It was much like Cerdin. The Eln-Kests had had an eye for gardens, for Istran beauty, declining to import showy exotics from Kalind, which would have died, neglected: these thrived. It was a quality of subtle taste unsuspected in folk whose front room decor was as it was. Raen thought of the green-and-white bedroom, and the subtlety of that, and reckoned that the same mind must have planned both, a character unlike what she knew of betas.

A large shadow appeared in the window, stopping her heart; it was Warrior—at least majat, wanting in. She opened the door, hand on the gun she had in her pocket, but it was in truth only Warrior, who sat down on the floor and preened itself of dew.

A little sugar-water more than satisfied it; it sang for her while it drank, and she stroked the auditory palps very softly in thanks for this.

“Others come,” it said then.

“Other blues? How do you know so, Warrior?”

It boomed a note of majat language. “Mind,” it translated, probably approximating.

“Is blue-hive not far, then?”

It shifted, never ceasing to drink, into a new orientation. “There.”

It faced down-arm from residence circle 4.

“Come that way,” it informed her, then reoriented half about. “Blue-hive there, our-hill.”

They would come an eighth of the way round the asterisk-city and up the wild interstice to the garden wall. And majat runners could cover that ground very quickly.

“When?”

It stopped drinking and measured with its body the future angle of the sun, a profound bow toward the far evening. Late, then. Twilight.

“This-hive hopes you remain with us, Warrior.”

It began drinking again. “This-unit likes sweet. Good, Kethiuy-queen.”

She laughed soundlessly. “Good, Warrior.” She touched it, eliciting a hum of pleasure, and went about her business. Warrior would of course do what the hive determined, immune to bribery, but Warrior would at least give its little unit of resistance to being removed, as valid a unit of the Mind as any other.

And the hive was reacting. She went about her work, schooling herself to concentration, but burning with an inner fire all the same: the hive…had heard her, regarded her. The approach through Kalind Warrior had had its imprint.

It was there again, the contact which she had lost. Nearly twenty years, and many attempts, and this one had taken: she had allies, the power of the hives.

All possibilities shifted hereafter. Being here, at the Edge, was no longer a protracted act of suicide, a high refuge, a place where enemies could not so easily follow: the circular character of events struck her suddenly and amazed her with her own predictability. She had run, a second time, for the hive.

It was time to attack.

House records had indicated a vehicle in the garage: systems in it seemed up and operable. Max and Merry both, by their papers, had some skill in that regard. “Go out,” she said, “and check it out by eye; I’m not inclined to trust housecomp’s word on it.”

They went. Citybank provided an atlas in printout. A sorrowfully thin atlas it proved to be, only a few pages thick, for an entire inhabited world. Newhope and Newport were
the
two cities, Newport seeming a very small place indeed; and the town of Upcoast was the other major concentration of population, only an administrative and warehousing area for the northern estates. The rest of the population was dotted all over the map, in the rain belts, on farms and pumping stations and farms which served as depots on the lacery of unpaved roads. Over most of the land surface of Istra was nothing but blankness, designated Uninhabited. There was the spectacular upsurge of the High Range on East; and an extremely wide expanse of marsh southward on West, marked Hazard, which given the habit of Istran nomenclature, might be the name of the place as well as its character. Small numbers were written beside the dots that were farms…2, 6, 7, and those in black; and by depots and by the cities, like-wise, but ranging up to 15,896 at Newhope.

Population, she realised. A world so sparse that they must give population in the outback by twos and threes.